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Everyone should read support emails

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Re: Everyone should read support emails

#121

Post by MBCook »

duxup wrote: post #112
massivecali wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on several projects where the actual needs would get distorted between the customers and the developers in a perverse game of telephone. Each producer or manager feeling the need to reinterpret as they saw fit.

My most recent job the head of the company had a great comment. One of the first things he told me "Our end users are not smart, no matter what anyone tells you. They can barely use a computer. Remember that." He wasn't wrong ;)

I HATE that attitude. It may occasionally be right (depends on your product/intended use) but it was the catch all ‘do as I say’ excuse one of the executives used at a previous job.

Have a suggestion on how something could be done better? Your way is too complicated and our users are dumb as posts. So we can’t do it. It’s not worth even thinking about.

Of course if THEY want to do the complicated hard to understand thing, it will be fine.

Just one of MANY examples.

Why do the job if you have actual contempt for your users?

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#122

Post by the_gastropod »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #115
jacquesm wrote: post #113

Take it one further: everyone should do support, not just read the emails. 1 day per month or so should do the job, it puts everybody in a good position to appreciate that if they don't do their work properly the support people end up taking the heat. So do not just read the emails, answer them, make it work for the end-user and spot the dysfunctional bits in your organization first hand.

> Take it one further: everyone should do support, not just read the emails. That's a really fast way to burn out your entire team. Devs don't necessarily have good communication or people skills. They haven't been trained to respond politely when someone sends them a screaming, all-caps e-mail that their product is garbage. That's my job as the Support Engineer.

While that stereotype may be true for some developers, I don't find it holds for most devs I know and work with. People incapable of dealing with emotion probably don't make great employees to begin with.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#123

Post by Spooky23 »

duxup wrote: post #52
superice wrote: post #43

This is why we regularly take developers to customers. It is eye-opening to see on-site that your mobile app with tiny but well-designed buttons doesn't work for registering container positions when the user is in a shaky 90 metric tons weighing machine, handling 30 metric ton containers. We write software for container terminal and other logistical actors, and seeing the software being used by real users is so incre…

I think that's valuable, but depends on the organization. At a company I worked at engineering used to go on customer visits, but the "customers" were the executives and managers who make buying decisions and put forth requirements. However, these were not the folks who actually used the product. Their opinion was important (gotta sell it) but it was NOTHING like what we saw in support. The the few times end users we…

Agreed.

I've seen many a time where the customer interface contacts believed whatever bullshit that they were peddling internally, and the information we had was essentially completely wrong.

Vendors walk a fine line with these issues. You have to keep the bullshitters happy as they control the money, but you need to get shit done to keep the golden goose producing when sponsors get promoted/fired/held accountable.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#124

Post by MBCook »

anilakar wrote: post #67
kruczek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While reading the article, I got a feeling that reading support emails is only one step away from answering support emails - and here you are, suggesting just that. I've seen further steps down this road - if there are engineers already answering support emails, then why do we need support people at all. After all, engineers have better knowledge of technical details and can make changes themselves. No need for inter…

The reason lower-tier support personnel are employed is because someone reasoned that the engineers' time is too valuable. If 90 % of incoming support requests will be escalated to developers, it makes little sense to have extra people whose main task is to create SAP tickets or press "forward" in Outlook. Another extra perk of making devs handle the support is that they also have the chance to fix the underlying pro…

> Remember that for an engineer, fixing broken software is always less of a burden than correspondence with customers.

Don’t be so sure. Just because you’ve identified the issue or a good fix doesn’t mean the ticket won’t go in the backlog to die a slow death before you’re allowed to fix it.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#125

Post by habosa »

We do this at Firebase! Actually right now I am about to start my week as "Support Sheriff" which means that I am the escalation point for support cases. Everyone on my team does this about once a quarter.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#126

Post by lbotos »

Hi, Support Engineering Manager here, who has forgone Dev for a career in Support.

In a small company (As companies grow 2 things that I think are really more valuable:

- Support Engineers, These are folks that have commit access and can write fixes, who are focused directly on customers. Don't distract product from new features, Support Engineers can fix low hanging bugs, (button states weird/form is weird, error messages wrong, etc, etc), and then funnel harder or product-changing bugs to product. For every 10 devs, I think you should have 1 Support Engineer.

- LISTENING to your support team. I always see companies and people doing the "uhm, oh yeah, we should totally all jump in and do support to better understand it" but really, it's like, trust and LISTEN to your support team, ask them what the most important thing to them is, and actually prioritize it.

It was extremely demoralizing when "holier than thou" devs came to do support and kicked and screamed for their week rotation. Sure, thats indicative of bad culture, but I promise you there are at least a few devs on your team who are this way right now. Let them be devs, instill a culture of trust and teamwork in different areas, and your company can scale and move fast.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#127

Post by behringer »

the_gastropod wrote: post #122
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take it one further: everyone should do support, not just read the emails. That's a really fast way to burn out your entire team. Devs don't necessarily have good communication or people skills. They haven't been trained to respond politely when someone sends them a screaming, all-caps e-mail that their product is garbage. That's my job as the Support Engineer.

While that stereotype may be true for some developers, I don't find it holds for most devs I know and work with. People incapable of dealing with emotion probably don't make great employees to begin with.

At one of the companies I've worked for, the tech team can be directed a ticket or whatever to look at, but they respond to the customer service team, not the customer.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#128

Post by systemtest »

superice wrote: post #43

This is why we regularly take developers to customers. It is eye-opening to see on-site that your mobile app with tiny but well-designed buttons doesn't work for registering container positions when the user is in a shaky 90 metric tons weighing machine, handling 30 metric ton containers. We write software for container terminal and other logistical actors, and seeing the software being used by real users is so incre…

I worked at a first-response call-center company where after each shift, they would go through the records that they processed that shift and manually count the number of high-priority incidents and various other metrics. They did this after each shift, taking about 15 minutes. For the last three years.

After my field visit I took it to the PO and we implemented these metrics in one sprint. With a single click they could print all import metrics about the last shift.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#129

Post by edw519 »

This works both ways. Once I took a job with a large software house who put me in support for my first 3 months (to learn the system :-) It was the worst software I had ever seen. Customers were calling in with problems that had been solved by everyone else 10 years prior. We had over 5,000 open bug tickets. And most of the programmers who had written them were still there, spewing out technical debt faster than ever (now that they were agile lol).

I couldn't even make it the 3 months. They didn't either. Their customers' lawyers were more agile than they were.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#130

Post by ox_cable »

MBCook wrote: post #121
duxup wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My most recent job the head of the company had a great comment. One of the first things he told me "Our end users are not smart, no matter what anyone tells you. They can barely use a computer. Remember that." He wasn't wrong ;)

I HATE that attitude. It may occasionally be right (depends on your product/intended use) but it was the catch all ‘do as I say’ excuse one of the executives used at a previous job. Have a suggestion on how something could be done better? Your way is too complicated and our users are dumb as posts. So we can’t do it. It’s not worth even thinking about. Of course if THEY want to do the complicated hard to understand t…

> Why do the job if you have actual contempt for your users?

To... To get paid, isn't that obvious? Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

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